“Have you ever walked past Sunny #4 and not smiled?” That was the question Mrs. Kari Hahm, a teacher at Zion Lutheran School, posed to the Museum when she recently shared the chalk drawings her students made, at home, of Alex Katz’s Sunny #4.

Do you need a place to keep all your creative ideas? Sketchbooks are a great option. Their pages can hold a jumble of doodles, notes, finished works of art—or all of the above! Artists often use their sketchbooks to work out big ideas and practice their drawings. Follow the steps below to create your own sketchbook!

On the first Monday in December, the Milwaukee Art Museum opens its doors to a passionate group of young people from the greater Milwaukee area. Dedicated educators and organizers prepare to greet more than 500 students in grades 3 through 12 who have come to be inspired by the thousands of works of art and express themselves through writing and drawing. This annual event is called the Art of Writing Young Authors and Artists Conference.

American artist Al Held (1928–2005) was an abstract painter, most famous for his large-scale, geometric works. His paintings are full of circles, squares, cubes, and other geometric shapes and forms that overlap. In the painting below, he used a masking technique to create lines with sharp edges. He masked (covered) the white sections with tape and painted the remaining sections black.